


tempus volat, hora fugit

by ExistentiallyFraught



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Law Student Adam, Post-Canon, Pynch endgame, although I have read CDTH so bits of it have influenced, background sarchengsey, takes into account Opal but not CDTH
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28762038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExistentiallyFraught/pseuds/ExistentiallyFraught
Summary: "When do bad things happen to dream things?""When something has happened to their dreamer."--On the day of Adam's college graduation, Ronan is nowhere to be found, and neither is the new dream forest he's been obsessively tinkering with over the years. While Ronan's friends try to get to the bottom of what took Ronan and his dreams, they find they just might have to give it the one thing that's most painful: time.
Relationships: Adam Parrish/Original Character(s), Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 6
Kudos: 33





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this fic has been in the works for two years, after I finished re-listening to all four books and was struck with inspiration while listening to "Almost" by Hozier. I wrote this beginning right then, and have stewed over it since. and now it finally starts making its way into the world. 
> 
> this is also my first time posting on ao3, so please forgive any formatting issues!

The one way they hadn’t grown was apart.

In the four years since finding Glendower’s body, since Gansey’s death and resurrection, since killing a demon and taking Cabeswater with it, Adam and Ronan had managed everything from date nights to explosive fights, to long-distance phone calls to long-distance drives. Each one had drawn them closer together, with Gansey, Blue, and Henry orbiting around them and weaving through them, until now, on the eve of Adam’s Harvard graduation, Adam felt a sense of pronounced peace. Even though he was acutely aware of the irrelevance of linear time, this felt like a milestone; he would finally have the Ivy degree he’d always dreamed of, and he would be going back to the Barns with Ronan and Opal for the summer before starting at Georgetown Law Center—an entire four months of uninterrupted time together, which they hadn’t had since before Adam left for Cambridge. If he’d been asked to predict this day five years ago, he knew he could have pictured the degree, but never that he would willingly be going back to Virginia, or the family that was waiting for him there.

Adam’s phone rang then, pulling him out of his blissful reverie. He always knew when it was Ronan calling, because Ronan had dreamed it to play whatever song he wanted in that moment as his ringtone. Normally, it was Murder Squash, but occasionally Ronan liked to change it up. Tonight, it was a strange, minor version of Pomp and Circumstance. Adam allowed himself a moment to grin and shake his head before picking up.

“Real nice, Lynch.”

“Thought you’d appreciate it. How’s the packing?”

Adam glanced around at his half-packed bedroom, most of what he owned either shoved into cardboard boxes or strewn over his bed.

“As fun as packing ever is,” he said. “Though I must say, packing to move home is much better than packing for school.”

He couldn’t help but smile as he said the word _home_ , and he could picture Ronan’s all those miles away, smooth and wide and a little bit wild all at the same time.

“What are you up to tonight? Remember to get Opal to bed early.” He knew this was a bit of a misnomer, as Opal didn’t so much go to bed as just _calm down_ for a few hours at best, but his worry about Ronan and Opal in a car together for ten hours allowed him the inaccuracy.

“Honestly man, I’d just stick her in the car tonight if she wouldn’t eat the leather.” Adam heard an indignant “Ker- _ah!_ ” muffling through the connection, and knew that Ronan had just ruffled Opal’s hair through her cap in his rough, adoring way. He abruptly hated the hours stretching between now and tomorrow afternoon with a vengeance.

“Hey, Opal,” he said, and threw a heavy, now-obsolete-thank-God textbook in a box labeled “Donate” in scrawled Sharpie. “Don’t give Ronan too much trouble tomorrow, okay?”

“No promises,” came her voice, and then the sound of her hooves scampering across hard-packed dirt.

“Yeah, one of you is going to die before you even cross a state line. Are you in the barn right now?”

“Affirmative.”

“Being careful?”

Adam tried his best to keep his voice nonchalant, but he failed at it every time. There was something about the new Cabeswater Ronan had grown in the narrow barn that unsettled Adam in a way he hadn’t thought he could be unsettled anymore; as miraculous and beautiful as the dreamscape was, there was something not quite _done_ about it, like a song cut off before its last chord fully ends. It had yet to even come close to hurting Ronan, though, and he often chalked it up to the troubling fact that this was a dream forest he could not communicate with or depend on to protect him and his friends.

“Affirmative.” Ronan left the _Jesus, Parrish_ unsaid, as it had been uttered so many times before that it echoed through each new conversation.

“Okay. Sorry. I trust you.”

“Damn straight,” Ronan said, but good-naturedly. “So, I was just checking in. I’m gonna get to dreaming so I won’t have any problems up there.”

“Gotcha. Love you, asshole.”

“Love ya, fucknut. See you soon.”

\------  


Adam awoke to a weight suddenly hitting the bed beside him and a voice in his ear.

“Wake up, sleepyhead!”

He shot up, heart pounding in his chest, to see Blue bouncing on top of the mattress beside him.

“Blue? I thought you were Opal for a second.”

“I find Blue often radiates the same energy as a perpetual-nine-year-old.” This was Cheng, poking his head into Adam’s bedroom. “How you doing there, Parrish?”

Next came Gansey, looking slightly sheepish. “Sorry, Adam, your roommate let us in and said you were still asleep. Though if I’m not mistaken, we had an appointment at 9?”

“Shoot, what time is it? My alarm must have not gone off…”

Adam swung his feet to the floor and reached for the bedside table for his phone, but his hand met nothing but old wood. Strange; he remembered setting the phone down right here before getting into bed, even double-checking that his alarm was set for 8:30 for breakfast with Gansey, Blue, and Henry before Ronan arrived that afternoon.

“Sorry, I must have accidentally packed my phone away or something,” he said, scanning the room and the smattering of neatly packed boxes awaiting their move to Virginia the next day. “Give me ten minutes and I’ll be ready to go.”

Trying to shake the disorientation that came with being abruptly woken, he threw on a T-shirt—though he was no longer mortally afraid of his closest friends seeing his bare torso and the history it still showed all too apparently, he’d made it a point to not open up that discussion to his roommates—and shuffled to the bathroom. Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he reached for his toothbrush and toothpaste, but found only the brush in the cup messily labeled “Adam” with Scotch tape. Maybe it had run out and he’d thrown it out? He couldn’t remember such a thing, but he had to admit he’d been a little sleep-deprived from the end of exams and distracted by the thought of going home, and it could have easily slipped his mind. He grabbed the toothpaste from the cup labeled “Ryan,” with a mental note to get him back for it before leaving tomorrow.

He ran a comb through his hair, slipped on jeans and sneakers, and met the others in the hallway, where they could finally have a proper reunion. Blue threw her arms around Adam’s neck, a smile beaming on her face. “What’s up, graduate? Got any smart things to learn us?”

She had gotten no taller in the years since Adam had first left for school, but it had been a pleasure watching her grow in other ways. She had come back from her year traveling with Gansey and Cheng with her arms and shoulders peppered with small tattoos, a memento for each place they had visited, and each time Adam saw her it seemed he noticed a new one.

“Not unless you want to hear about biochemistry. How was Sri Lanka?”

“Ugh, amazing!” She pretended to swoon into Gansey’s arms. “The _trees_ , Adam, the _trees_!”

“Now you’ve got her talking about the Sri Lankan trees again,” Gansey said with a laugh. “I swear one day she’s going to leave me for an Ironwood.”

Adam had woken up now, but still couldn’t shake the feeling of disorientation—that something wasn’t right. He chalked it up to his missing cell phone and his lack of time to look for it; that must be it.

“Any word from Ronan?” Gansey asked as they made their way out of Adam’s building.

“I talked to him last night. What time is it?”

Gansey pulled out his sleek phone. “Almost ten.”

“He should definitely be on the road, then, unless he got too caught up with Cabeswater. I hope Opal will be okay in the car for that long.”

It was Opal’s first time visiting Cambridge, and Adam would be lying if he said he wasn’t nervous about it. There were so many things that could go wrong—there were leaves and graduation programs to be chewed, hoof-hiding boots to be kicked off, people to speak to in Latin or her dream language. Nevertheless, he was excited to show her his campus, so she could see where he’d left to all those times, and where he’d never have to leave to again.

Something, though, was keeping the warm excitement in his chest from spreading through the rest of him: that persistent feeling that something was ever so slightly off. It persisted through the obligatory yet enjoyable rattling off of each student’s recent escapades, Blue’s field research and Gansey’s anthropology studies and Henry’s graphic design curriculum and Adam’s last slog of exams; it persisted through Blue delightedly presenting Adam with the largest cupcake he’d ever seen—verging on true cake status—with the world’s most obnoxious “Congrats, Grad!” plastic topper stuck into it; it persisted when they temporarily parted ways back at Adam’s apartment, with promises from Blue and Gansey and Henry to keep trying Ronan until they got an update; it persisted when Adam retrieved his graduation gown from where it hung on the back of his door; and it boiled over when he finally realized what it was exactly that was throwing him off.

\------

“Declan?”

Blue and Henry’s heads snapped towards Gansey in surprise. _Declan?_ Blue mouthed.

“Gansey.” Declan’s voice was breathless. Panicked. “Is Ronan there?”

Gansey’s heart jumped in his chest. He instinctively reached for Blue’s hand—his anchor. “He hasn’t shown up to Adam’s yet,” he said cautiously.

Declan swore, so loudly and colorfully that Gansey moved the phone farther away from his ear.

“Have you heard from him? At all?”

“No, we figured he got delayed on the road…Declan, what’s wrong?”

“Matthew’s missing.”

“Matthew’s _missing_?”

Now Blue and Henry’s eyes were as wide as Gansey’s felt. Blue squeezed his hand and exchanged a worried look with Henry.

“And all of Ronan’s dream-things in Matthew’s room are gone,” Declan continued. His voice sounded thin, as if it were about to break, and Gansey’s lungs constricted around his heart.

Right then, his phone beeped. Another call.

“Hold on Declan, this might be Ronan!” He switched the calls, barely registering the unknown number on the screen, and, breathlessly: “Ronan?”

“Gansey!” Not Ronan, but a terrified Adam. “Something’s wrong. My phone is missing, Ronan’s toothpaste is missing, I can’t hear—“

“Matthew’s missing.”

“ _What?_ Where are you?”

“We got to the stadium early, we wanted to get good seats—“

“Meet me on the corner right outside in five minutes. Gansey, something’s wrong.”

Gansey’s mind buzzed and blanked with panic as Adam hung up and Declan’s voice reappeared on the line. A crowd of people milled around them, bustling parents and families with pride almost tangibly emanating from them. He allowed himself a second-long luxury to pretend that in this moment he could be one of them, simply Adam’s brother eagerly readying his camera to capture his walk across the stage.

Henry unceremoniously plucked the phone from his hand. “Mr. President, it seems we have a situation.”

\------

Adam barely stopped the BMW long enough for the three of them to pile in. He was freshly shaven, wearing a button-up and dress pants; when Gansey slid into the backseat, he noticed a cap and gown thrown haphazardly onto the floor.

“We’re going to the Barns,” Adam said.

"What about your graduation?” Gansey knew as he was asking that the question was now irrelevant, but couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“Matthew’s missing,” Adam replied. “All of his dream objects are missing. All of _my_ dream objects are missing—my phone, the toothpaste, my watch, and I noticed other little things that aren’t in my room. _And_ the ley line is completely silent for me, which has only happened in surges when Ronan’s fucked with the new Cabeswater.”

“It could be just some freak thing—“

“When do bad things happen to dream things?” Adam’s voice was short and cold, but Gansey knew it was out of fear. He sighed heavily, shakily, and let his head fall back against his seat.

“When something has happened to their dreamer.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In lieu of graduation, Adam, Gansey, Blue and Henry investigate the Barns for a sign of Ronan.

Adam tore down the highway, pressing the gas pedal nearly to the floor. It took all his concentration to stay in the lane, to keep his hands on the wheel instead of desperately wringing them. He knew driving wasn’t practical, but the soonest flight hadn’t been until late that night even with Gansey’s attempts at pulling every string in his family’s arsenal, and though driving was long, it would get them to Singer’s Falls the quickest.

He was vaguely aware of Gansey’s weak attempts at reasoning and comfort from the backseat, vaguely aware of Henry cracking the window, sending Robobee into the air, and crouching over his phone, vaguely aware of Blue’s steady hand momentarily covering his on the gear shift, but it was as if he had finally lost the rest of his hearing; every sense was dulled except for the feel of the leather gripped tightly in his hands. His mind sped even faster than the BMW, flitting through worst case scenarios, rationalizations, memories.

The bottom line was that Ronan wouldn’t have missed Adam’s graduation if he’d had any say in the matter. Despite his jokes about the futility of academia and the evil of the Establishment, Ronan had emerged as Adam’s biggest cheerleader. While they’d both pretended to maintain a cool demeanor throughout the last few months of Adam’s degree, they both knew the other was just as excited for this day. No; if Ronan hadn’t gotten to Cambridge, it was because something had forced him not to.

The deep silence ate at him. He had not lived with it since the days after Gansey had sacrificed himself to kill the demon, and Cabeswater in turn had sacrificed itself to revive him; the drain on the ley line had been so profound that, especially without Cabeswater to help focus him, Adam had lost his grip on the ley line entirely before its energy slowly sputtered back into his veins. Though Cambridge was miles off from a ley line, and farther still from their corpse road, he had always been able to sense its energy, with Ronan’s new Cabeswater adding to its buzz. 

But now, there was nothing. If Ronan’s unresponsiveness had been concerning, if the missing dream objects had been alarming, the silence wrapping itself around-behind-within Adam was devastating. 

It had been an hour, perhaps two, perhaps five, when sound zoomed back into Adam’s ear with Henry’s voice.

“Ronan’s car is still in the driveway.”

“Well, that’s positive, right?” Gansey’s voice. “That means he didn’t get into a car accident or anything.”

“But it means something stopped him from driving in the first place,” came Blue’s small retort. 

Adam’s hands were gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles had turned white, and his fingers tingled with lack of blood circulation. His legs felt like iron, and his head felt like someone was drilling a hole into it.

A few more minutes of silence, when Gansey’s voice cut through the tension. “Adam, pull over,” he ordered. “I’m driving.”

“I’m fine,” he said through gritted teeth. If he didn’t have the wheel to grip, the pedal to press towards the floor, then he had only his hands to wring and his thoughts to spiral into. “It’s only a few more hours.”

“Adam—“

“Gansey.”

And that was the end of it. By the time they were finally winding through the back roads that led towards the Barns, Adam’s whole body felt like it was one big cramp, his eyelids as though they had weights sewn into them. But he had not swerved once, nor slowed down save to refill the tank, and when he sprang from the car Blue had the good sense to let him lean on her as his legs regained feeling, but not to make a show of it.

Once the pins and needles had subsided enough for him to run, Adam took off towards the shed where the new Cabeswater lived. With every step he took, the awful sense in his gut that had been rising ever since that morning grew stronger, until he felt altogether nauseous.

Sure enough, when he bashed open the door of the shed, the three others following close behind, they were met with…nothing. An empty room, save for some random pieces of furniture, loose papers strewn on the floor, snack wrappers thrown in a small pile—all things that hadn’t been dreamt. Everything else was…

“Gone. It’s all gone.” It was Gansey who breathed it, disbelief and pain laced in each word. Through all the years that Ronan had tinkered with this new Cabeswater, Gansey had rivaled Adam for the person most invested in his success; Adam suspected perhaps it was something to do with the fact that he was the living embodiment of the old Cabeswater, had its trees and rivers and vines now collapsed into his veins.

Adam immediately folded himself cross-legged on the floor, closed his eyes, and held out his hand.

“Blue.”

He felt her unquestioning hand in his.

“Don’t you need a bowl, or a flame, a mirror—“ Adam kept his eyes closed, but could picture all too well Gansey pacing through the barn, and Henry’s quizzical eyes following him.

“Shut up,” he snapped. He didn’t care, couldn’t care, about sounding rude. Tuning into the darkness and letting the power from Blue’s touch course through him, he cast his mind as wide as he possibly could, then a little further, then a little further.

If Ronan were lost, then he didn’t much care whether he got lost, too.

Darkness, nothingness, then—a flicker, like the flash of a camera, quick and blinding and gone in an instant. Further, further. He stayed connected enough to know when Blue took his other hand. Further, darker…darker…

His eyes flew open as his body hit the ground. Blue had jerked him forward, letting him fall face-first on the dusty floor of the shed. He allowed himself to stay down, breathing hard.

“Adam?” Blue said gently. “Sorry, but you were going too far, and I had to wake you.”

“Nothing’s there. “ As he said it, he felt an icy cold creep into his chest, spreading to his limbs. “Cabeswater’s gone, an’ I think it took Ronan with it.”

It had been years since his Henrietta accent had broken through to his lips, but there, almost hyperventilating on the floor of the shed, he laid bare his panic and exhaustion.

Blue fell heavily beside him, and it was only seconds before Gansey and Cheng followed suit. They’d been in tough spots before, the five of them, but it had been a long time since they’d had to face this kind of unbridled, terrifying chaos. This feeling of knowing something was very, very wrong, but not knowing how to even begin knowing what to do. 

“No sign of Opal, either,” Gansey said quietly after a long minute. “Do you think, wherever they are, they’re together?”

Adam’s heart sank even further. Of course; Opal was a dream-thing too, and must have been taken with whatever took the new Cabeswater. He pictured her sitting alone in the utter blackness he had scried into, pulling at her skull cap in fear, and wished hard that, if Ronan and Opal had to be missing, they were missing together.

It was then that he saw it: at the foot of a raggedy stool next to where Ronan’s rain used to sit, a small, black box that looked like it was covered in velvet.

Blue followed his gaze, and groaned. The noise was so unexpectedly ordinary as it echoed off the walls of the barren shed that it temporarily jerked Adam out of the icy, sinking sensation.

“Blue?”

“It’s, um…” She chewed at her lip, clearly uncertain, eyes flicking from Adam to the velvet box. “Oh, screw it, I think you should just go open it.”

Adam glanced at Gansey and Henry, but they looked just as confused as he felt by Blue’s cageyness. Nevertheless, he lifted himself from the floor, crossed the few steps to the stool, scooped the small box into his hand, and flipped up the top.

Two gold-colored bands sat nestled side by side in yet more velvet, unadorned yet beautiful in their simplicity. Adam’s breath hitched in his throat. He hesitated, then slipped one of the rings out of its cloth bed; as it lay in his palm, he caught sight of words engraved on the inside of the shimmering gold:

Unguibus et Rostro.

It was like a physical force had hit his chest, so much so that he felt himself take a step backwards. He was immediately transported back almost five years earlier, when they were just eighteen, when Ronan had first kissed him, when he had first kissed Ronan; then to watching Ronan being unmade by the demon, Adam helpless to stop it, mint leaves and stars and bits of paper spilling from his dreams; then to their first big fight, when the tension over Adam leaving for college had finally bubbled over, then to making up, resting their foreheads against each other and whispering promises to meet this challenge and every one that came after it. Unguibus et rostro.

“Are these…he didn’t dream these?”

When Blue spoke, he looked not at her, but kept staring at the rings. “No, he didn’t want them to be dreamed. He just had them engraved.”

“And you knew about this?”

Now he met her eyes, and she looked sheepish.

“Well, yeah, Ronan asked me to help him a while ago. It was actually adorable. Pretty sure he’s been carrying those around for weeks.”

Just when Adam felt a smile tug the corner of his mouth upwards, he remembered where he was, and how empty it was, and what he was doing there. The constricting, freezing feeling returned to his chest, and he clapped the box shut again.

“Okay, we should…we should…” But it was suddenly difficult to get words out, suddenly hard to get air in. His head was swimming with a swell of panic, and it felt like his entire chest was encased in ice. 

Gansey immediately appeared at his side and clamped a hand on his shoulder. “We should figure out what to do from here.”

Adam nodded, grateful, leaning ever so slightly into Gansey’s support. 

“Blue,” Gansey continued, and tossed her his phone, “Can you call Fox Way and let your mom know we’re on our way?”

“Calla,” Adam interjected, still struggling to find the breath to form the word. 

“I think what Adam means to say”—and now Henry was on his other side, hand mirroring Gansey’s on his shoulder—“is that we should make sure Calla is home, so she can see what she can discern from these engagement rings.”

Engagement rings. Was that really what he was holding? Unguibus et rostro. Talons and beak. Tooth and nail.

The vow they’d taken to fight together through whatever they would face, and now, Adam knew with growing certainty, how Adam would have to fight to bring Ronan back from wherever he’d gone.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fox Way gets involved.

The instant Calla’s hand touched the ring box, she recoiled.

“Well,” she said drily, “it seems the snake has emotions other than rage after all.” She looked pointedly at Adam, and he felt heat rise in his face.

“Yeah, yeah, we know that,” said Blue. “They’re sickening. But what can you see about what happened before Ronan dropped this?”

Now, Calla took the box in her hand, curling her plum-tipped fingers around it. Her mouth quirked.

“It’s not clear,” she said, after a long pause. “There’s no fear or trepidation. Wherever he went, he went willingly.”

“But you don’t know where?” Adam pried.

“Away,” Calla stated plainly.

“Away _where_?” Frustration was beginning to overpower Adam’s panic, and even Gansey’s reassuring hand on his shoulder was doing little to assuage it.

“I am not ‘Find My Friend.’ Your snake was holding this box, then he wasn’t. He went Away.”

She held the box back out to Adam, but he simply stared at it.

“No,” he said slowly. “No, you have to see more. Where did he go? Did Cabeswater take him somewhere? Did something take Cabeswater?”

“Ronan voluntarily chose to step out of this plane. Wherever he is, he is fine.”

“ _What does that mean_?” Adam was practically yelling now, and Gansey’s hand squeezed his shoulder in warning, but this did not faze Calla one bit.

“I can’t help you any more than this,” she said, holding his gaze with narrowed eyes. “And it’s a good thing for you, because I wouldn’t have anyway.”

And she stalked off into the kitchen; moments later, they heard the great clanking of cabinet doors, and smelled something pungent wafting into the living room.

Adam fell into the couch, letting his head roll back in annoyance. “Well, if she’s not going to help…”

“If Calla says that’s all she can tell, that’s all she can tell,” Blue piped up. “She’s not intentionally hiding something from us, Adam.”

“’Step out of this plane,’ though? What does that _mean_?”

“Maybe…he’s dreaming somewhere,” Gansey said. “He’s in a dream-space, and so technically not on this plane of existence. And that would be somewhere he’d go willingly. Maybe he just got stuck or something.”

“And he just decided to take everything he’s ever dreamed with him? Along with Cabeswater 2.0?” Blue asked, skeptical. Adam felt a surge of gratitude that she wasn’t trying to sugarcoat or rationalize Ronan’s absence.

Gansey removed his glasses and rubbed at his eye with the heel of his hand. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“What _I_ know,” said Henry, appearing at Gansey’s side, “is we have to call Declan, to tell him what’s happened and see if he’s seen anything, and we have to call a moving company for your stuff in Cambridge, Adam.”

Cambridge, that morning, his entire college experience seemed so far away that Adam had completely forgotten about the boxes stacked in his room in his shared apartment, awaiting their move to Virginia. Leave it to Cheng to remember logistics in a crisis.

“Movers will be more expensive than the fine I’ll get from my landlord for not being out in time. I’ll just message Ryan to let him know. Can I use your phone?”  


Gansey handed over his sleek iPhone; though Ronan had convinced him to take a dreamed phone when he moved away, Adam had insisted that it not be like Ronan’s or Gansey’s—so thin and fragile, glass just waiting to break in his roughened hands.

He took the liberty of logging Gansey out of his Facebook account—primarily used for political networking—and logging himself into his own—barren except for RSVPs to Harvard campus events and ridiculous things shared mostly by Blue and Ronan. Except now, his account seemed to be flooded with little red notifications of messages.

_Adam! Where are you?_

_Where you at, man?_

_Hey dude, everything okay? Ryan said you had an emergency or something and your phone isn’t on..._

_Missing you out here! Hope everything is okay!_

_ADAAAAAAAAAM!_

_Hey man, hope all’s good. Let me know when you can get back, but no rush, I moved your stuff into my room so you’re technically out on time and you’ll get your deposit back._

The last one was from Ryan. Adam felt a great wave of appreciation for the people he’d left behind just that morning—what felt like a thousand years ago. The bonds he’d made with his classmates at Harvard weren’t as deep, couldn’t be as deep, as the ones he’d forged with his friends in Henrietta, but they were still bonds, and a new pain pinged through his heart. Most of them had met and become friends with Ronan as well, and the thought of telling them all he was…

_Gone._

A wave of the icy nausea swept over him once again, and Gansey’s phone slipped from his hand onto the couch beside him. It was hard to breathe again, hard to focus on anything except the constriction of his chest around his heart, hard to feel anything except a profound sense of _emptiness_ that for once had nothing to do with the ley line.

Something hot was unceremoniously shoved into his hands, and a pungent, herbal smell filled his nose.

“Drink,” Calla’s voice ordered, and because Adam could think of nothing else he could possibly do, he drank. The concoction didn’t taste much better than it smelled, but warmth began returning to his chest, and it became marginally easier to breathe.

“Thanks,” he gasped, eyes tearing with the fumes rising from the mug in his hands.

“All of it,” was all Calla said, but she briefly placed a hand on Adam’s shoulder before sweeping back into the kitchen, her weight on the couch cushion almost immediately replaced by Blue’s.

“I don’t envy you,” she said. “That one’s nasty. It really works to calm nerves, though.” Her voice was slightly strained, and when Adam looked up to meet her eyes, he saw tears threatening to break through her resolve. She rested her head on Adam’s shoulder, and sighed deeply. “What do we do, Adam?”  


He braced himself and took another swig from the still-fuming mug. The cold had leached out of him, only to be replaced with a heavy, bone-deep exhaustion. “Was going to ask you the same thing.”

\------

The next few days became a blur of tarot readings, tea leaf readings, psychometry readings, and every other type of reading the women of 300 Fox Way could perform. Declan had arrived, wild-eyed, early the morning after they had discovered Ronan, Matthew, and Opal missing, and seemed to have no plans to leave before getting at least some new information as to their whereabouts. The problem was, nothing was working; every reading turned up empty, every question remained unanswered. The consensus always came back to the fact that none of them had resisted going wherever they went, and that they were simply Somewhere Else.

“We _know_ they’re somewhere else!” Declan roared, as Calla dropped one of Matthew’s gaming controllers back into his hands. “I need to know where that _is_!”

But Declan’s storming could not change what Maura, Calla, and any other psychic saw, or, more accurately, what they didn’t see. After twenty-four hours, there had been a debate as to whether to report Ronan and Matthew missing; in the end, they had concluded that there would be nothing the police could do except ask unanswerable questions about Ronan, the rest of the Lynches, and the Barns, so it was best to keep it internal. Afterwards, Declan went into full crisis management mode; there wasn’t much he had to do to cover for Ronan, but Matthew, just out of Aglionby and in the midst of college planning, was more complicated. Adam watched, and found himself envying the seemingly never-ending list of tasks on Declan’s plate.

Adam did the one thing he could do—scry for hours each day, anchoring himself to Blue and wandering as far as she would let him, pushing himself to the point of utter exhaustion.

“Okay, that’s it.” Blue barely gave him time to reorient himself after wrenching him away from the inky darkness for what seemed like the thousand and first time. “It’s been five days, and this has gotten you nothing but bruises.

“Those are from you—“

“Have you showered in the last day?” she cut him off. “Have you eaten?

The answers, he knew she knew, were _no_ and _kind of_ , so Adam said nothing.

“Listen,” Blue said, softer now and helping to pull him back into a seated position on the couch. “I want to find them more than anything too, you know I do, but pushing yourself like this clearly isn’t helping.”

“This is the only thing I can do.” The truth of it weighed on Adam’s shoulders, adding to their ever-present ache from the stress he held in his neck. “Short of putting up fliers like they’re lost goddamn dogs, which we know wouldn’t do anything because we know they’re not even on this goddamn plane of existence…”

Blue let him ramble himself into silence, her head resting on his shoulder; it had become their default position, their silent way of holding each other up.

“You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want, but I think you should go home, get some proper sleep. If we’re still getting nothing after a day or two, we’ll reconvene, try to come up with a better game plan.”

Adam blinked. “Home?”

“Yeah, the Barns,” Blue replied, her voice gentle. “At least there you’ll have a bed and some space, unlike here.”

Adam was shaking his head before he was even aware that he was doing so. Stay at the Barns, without Ronan, without Opal? “I don’t think I can go stay there. It’s too empty, I couldn’t…do you think…um, do you think I could stay with you guys in D.C. while I figure stuff out?”

Blue leaned away from him and grabbed at the collar of her shirt, clutching fake pearls in fake astonishment. “Adam Parrish? Voluntarily requesting hospitality? And from Richard Campbell Gansey the Third, no less?”

Gansey poked his head around the corner of the reading room, where he’d been in deep conversation with Maura. “You called, Jane?”

“Yeah, Dick. Adam’s gonna sleep in our guest room for a little bit.”

“Oh, splendid!” And with that, he withdrew back into the reading room.

Adam wanted to feel gratitude, to feel relief, to feel anything other than the icy cold that had semi-permanently settled in his ribcage, but every emotion felt sluggish, as if he had to actively remember what anything other than emptiness and panic felt like. Blue was right; it was time to leave Fox Way and look towards next steps, but doing so felt like a kind of defeat. To move to D.C. was to move even farther from the Barns, and risk weakening his ability to scry into the space around the now Cabeswater-less shed. But, like Blue had said, scrying was turning up nothing. In fact, _everything_ was turning up nothing, and they were rapidly running out of ways to fail to make any breakthrough whatsoever. And so Adam gritted his teeth, and welcomed the comfortingly familiar pain in his jaw, and pushed himself to his feet.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gansey learns that grief is one thing he can't bend to his will.

If asked, Gansey would have had trouble recounting the few minutes leading up to him furtively beckoning Maura into the reading room and falling heavily into an armchair. What he could have recounted in great detail were the expressions on his friends’ faces, highlighted in color in a world that had gone abruptly gray: Declan’s uncharacteristic wildness, Henry’s quiet anxiousness, Blue’s resolve barely masking her franticness, Adam’s growing look of defeat. Them, and the slipping of his own stoicism.

Now, under Maura’s gaze, he felt it almost completely slip away, his shoulders involuntarily slumping the tiniest bit.

“I need you to tell me,” he began slowly, piecing together why it had been so imperative in his mind to speak to Maura alone, “if you think there is even the most minute possibility that Calla isn’t being entirely forthcoming in what she’s sensing.”

Maura gazed at him for a second too long for it to be comfortable, but when she spoke, her voice wasn’t angry. “Calla and Ronan will never be the best of friends, but she’d never lead you astray with something like this.”

Gansey removed his glasses with one hand and rubbed at his eye with the heel of the other. “Then, what do you think we’re missing here? There’s got to be _something_.”

"What we’re missing—“ she reached out and gently removed Gansey’s hand from his face, and he blinked gratefully as bright spots appeared and dissipated from his vision—“is time.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning, based on what we’ve been gleaning, that Ronan will return after he’s done doing whatever he stepped out to do.”

She said _stepped out_ as if Ronan had merely taken a phone call in another room. Gansey was careful to keep his annoyance out of his voice.

“Adam’s never going to be okay with that answer.”

“And I’ll eat this book if you are. I know. But that’s my answer.”

He opened his mouth, but before he could retort, he heard Blue’s raised voice say his full name, her tone tinged with humor. He immediately placed his glasses neatly back on his face and looked out into the living room.

“You called, Jane?”

She was at the tail end of her classic, comforting, Adam-Parrish-just-asked-for-something-pearl-clutching routine, though her expression was gentler than usual and her knee was knocked against Adam’s. Adam’s face wanted to smile, but instead did nothing.

“Yeah, Dick. Adam’s gonna sleep in our guest room for a little bit.”

“Oh, splendid!”

He measured out joviality in exact increments. Not enough to accidentally be inappropriately cheerful; just enough to let Blue know that he was not, in fact, about to break down to her mother.

He turned back to Maura. She raised one eyebrow in a gesture that said she absolutely knew he was about to break down to Blue’s mother.

He thrust his hands out towards her, palms up, offering for inspection the ancient lines etched into a young man’s hands. “There’s got to be something,” he repeated, the cheerful mask now completely gone. “I have the old Cabeswater in me, right? And that was Ronan’s, so there’s got to be some kind of connection, right? Tell me you can see something. Tell me we’ve been missing something.”

He could hear the desperation in his own voice now, but he was becoming too exhausted to keep disguising it. He stared at his wrists, at the point where they met his palms, at the veins underneath the tanned skin, pulsing with something more than blood. He had become accustomed, over the years, to the often-overwhelming feeling of time stretching before him in every direction, the feeling of _possibility_ thrumming in his very cells. But now it all felt so useless—as useless as he’d felt that night, all those years ago, when it was Ronan’s wrists, Ronan’s blood, suspended in one moment that seemed to stretch limitlessly into the darkness. At least then, he’d been able to call an ambulance, stay by Ronan’s side, pry for updates and prognoses from the hospital staff; now, all he could do was dolefully meet Maura’s gaze and hope against hope that she would suddenly give him the solution he craved. 

He realized his hands were shaking only when Maura wordlessly reached out to steady them.

“Please.” His voice felt tight now, as if all the anguish he’d been trying to suppress was now clawing its way up his throat. “He’s my brother. I can’t lose him like this.” Like this. With all the potential in the world, and no way to help. “I have to do something.”

“ _We_ ,” Maura finally spoke, and covered his hands with her own to create a comforting warmth, “will keep looking. That’s all we can do for now.”

Not for the first time, Gansey desperately—childishly—missed his firefly. He was so used to its quiet presence perching on his shoulder, or settling into his pocket when he needed it to hide. Sometimes it flitted away to, Gansey assumed, visit Ronan, to do its now-obsolete job of letting him know where Gansey was. Ronan had once offered to find a way to get rid of it, but Gansey had shot him down. The little light had become like a friend, his constant companion ever since Ronan had dreamed it to find him all those years ago, when Gansey had followed the ravens, when they had at long last found Glendower’s body, when—

He shook his head sharply to physically dislodge the memory of falling from Blue’s arms, everything fading to gray before bursting back into vibrant, violent color. It had happened so long ago, and yet was still happening, was always happening, and time was slipping, _he_ was slipping…

Maura’s hands squeezed his, enough to startle him back into the moment.

“Now don’t you go wandering off on us, too,” she said. Her voice, like her hands, was comforting and firm all at the same time. She put a hand to his cheek before sweeping out of the room, and Gansey felt a wave of affection and gratitude.

But ultimately, Maura didn’t understand; she and the other Fox Way women had their various psychic abilities, Adam had his scrying, Blue had her battery, but Gansey was the only one who had been resurrected for a purpose—not once, but twice. The first time, he’d thought the purpose had been to find Glendower, but had concluded after a brief spiraling, questioning period that it had truly been to end the demon threatening his friends, his family, his home. In the ensuing years, after Cabeswater had stitched him back together and propped him back up into something resembling a man, he’d desperately looked for the meaning of his second resurrection. There was no more Glendower to hunt, no more favor to gain, no more Cabeswater to explore, but there _was_ Blue and Henry, Adam and Ronan, even Helen and Declan and Maura and his own parents, and once Blue had exasperatedly asked him whether that wasn’t enough. And of course she knew it was, but she too understood the longing for _something more._

And maybe, perhaps, here it was. Just like Glendower had been the reason for his living when he was younger, wasn’t Ronan, technically, for dreaming Cabeswater in the first place and asking it to sacrifice itself for Gansey, the reason Gansey was alive now?

But, unlike Glendower, there were no clues to where Ronan may be hidden, and no train of zealous, niche historians who’d already laid the important groundwork. There was just this: Richard Campbell Gansey III, trembling and useless, crumpling into a mismatched armchair and willing his heart to stop aching.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has my favorite blink-and-you'll-miss-it detail from TRK that I always wish people would incorporate in fics, so I did it myself :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan's immediate circle isn't the only one affected by the disappearances, and to whom would that fall other than Declan Lynch?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw for brief discussion of alcohol usage

Zoe had never had much to do with Declan Lynch. For all intents and purposes, he just seemed so _boring_ , and Zoe Lawrence did not have time for boring people. But it was hard not to cross paths now and then when Declan’s little brother happened to be her best friend.

She illegally double-parked, hopped out of her Audi, and pounded on the door of the Lynch’s townhouse.

“Matthew Lynch!” she shouted, voice tearing through the quiet street, buzzing underneath the streetlamps. “Either answer your phone or answer this door before I kick it in!”

A few more seconds of pounding, and then the door opened; Zoe had to freeze her fist in midair to avoid socking the glasses right off Declan Lynch’s face, but it wasn’t the only reason she stopped short.

Declan looked… _haggard_ wasn’t the right word, with his face still clean-shaven and his mouth set in a pleasant smile of surprise, but it was close to it. She had never seen a hair on the man’s head out of place, nor a hint of a shadow underneath his handsome eyes, and now the combination of both made him look years younger and years older at the same time.

She realized she didn’t actually know how old Matthew’s brother was.

“Zoe,” he said in his unoffending politician’s voice. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She held back an eyeroll and returned his pleasant smile. “If I hadn’t made it obvious, I am Matthew-hunting.” Awaiting no invitation, she ducked under Declan’s arm into the house. As always, it was pristine, right out of a fancy catalogue. Spotless. Soulless. She always had trouble picturing bright, bouncy Matthew actually living here, but Declan looked like he was molded from the same marble as the table in the entryway. “Kid won’t answer his phone and we’ve got to lock down our plans for the summer.”

Unfazed, Declan closed the door behind her. “You two had plans for the summer?”

Zoe thought she imagined the slightest edge to his voice, but brushed it off; no use trying to make up anything interesting about the poster child for white male privilege standing before her. “Yessiree. _Have_ , not had. We’re going to plan a road trip that draws ‘M’ and ‘Z’ across the US.”

Declan pinched the bridge of his nose in a gesture that made her decide he was actually eighty-nine years old, as if processing the inanity of this plan. The inanity, of course, was the point.

“If it makes you feel better, I first suggested that we draw a dick, but he shut that down.”

This almost, almost elicited a laugh. Or maybe it was just a cough.

“No,” Declan said, “that sounds perfect for you and Matthew. The problem is, he never told me about this.”

“With all due respect, he’s over eighteen—“

Declan put a hand up to stop her in her tracks. “I meant, he didn’t tell me this before he made other plans.”

Zoe reached for the braid slung over her shoulder and began toying with the hair ties holding it together. “What do you mean?”

Declan sighed, and in the sigh was something heavy. “Matthew left on a trip with Ronan a few days ago. I think he posted about it on his socials.”

This time, Zoe didn’t bother to keep her eyes from rolling. _His socials_ , as though Matthew were some corporate-sponsored podcast with an Instagram account.

“I’m on a social media cleanse this month,” she said with a jerked shrug of her shoulder. “Are you sure? He wouldn’t have left without telling me.”

“Am I sure that my brothers are gone?” Declan chuckled, but there was that slight edge again underneath the word _gone_. “Yes, I’m sure. It was last minute; you know how impulsive Ronan gets. Something to celebrate the end of high school and college for them. And like you said, they’re over eighteen, so I couldn’t have stopped them.”

It was true that Zoe had had slightly more to do with Ronan than with Declan, and it was true that while Declan repelled her with his vanilla blandness, Ronan’s snarling impulsiveness intrigued her. Once, to piss off Declan, Ronan had given an unlicensed Matthew and Zoe the keys to his BMW and told them to have a ball. She smiled internally at the memory, but externally tried to mimic Ronan’s smirk.

“Well, if you get in touch with him, tell him to oh so kindly let me know next time he intends to ditch me.”

Before she turned back towards the door, braid flinging behind her back, she caught a glimpse through the open-plan apartment, and, more specifically, at the man sitting unassumingly at the kitchen island. He was so still and silent that she hadn’t noticed him before; but, more than that, it was like he blended into the monochromatic décor around him, like an oversized and flowerless vase, with his gray suit, gray shoes, even gray eyes. For less than a moment, those eyes locked onto hers, and she felt, somewhere deep in her bones, _unsettled_. Like she was guilty of something she didn’t yet know she’d done. Like this man could uncoil her DNA and read every inch of it.

She whirled away from Declan and the man’s piercing eyes and hurried out the door.

\------

“I like that one,” the Gray Man said. The slam from the front door still reverberated through the house.

Declan let both his shoulders and his face fall.

“She drives Matthew to be an even bigger pain in my ass. Literally, drives him.”

“She caught you off guard.”

It wasn’t a question, but Declan had long since become accustomed to Gray’s ability to read him—read _everyone_ —like a book. It was the reason he trusted him; he had no other choice. That, and the fact that the Gray Man had spent the past five years looking out for the Lynches, which was more then he could say about most other people in his life.

Gray, of course, was right. It wasn’t Zoe’s storming and vulgarity that had thrown him, he was used to that, but the information she disclosed. Matthew had never so much as taken a walk without Declan knowing about it, and he’d been planning a cross country road trip without breathing a word of it? Then, there was the matter of the lies he’d told, and how he’d now have to do a better job of keeping them up now that Zoe Lawrence’s scrutiny was upon them.

Gray read his mind: “You don’t think you got a tad too detailed there? A joint graduation trip?”

Declan shook his head. “I had to be more detailed with her. You don’t know her; she wouldn’t have taken anything less for an answer.”

Gray met Declan’s eyes and nodded. Trust was a two-way street. He joined him back at the island, where two freshly poured wine glasses had waited patiently for Zoe to leave.

“So, as you were saying…”

“Yes. I followed up on the lead, and it was dead. It stemmed from the same bounty I quashed last year.”

Declan kept the mixture of relief and disappointment from reaching his face, but he knew Gray sensed it anyway. It was always like this, when the trail went cold again. On one hand, it meant his brothers weren’t somehow in the hands of someone who fancied himself the new Greenmantle, or something worse; on the other, it meant he was back to square one, and no closer to bringing them home.

“And the agreement is still holding?”

“As strongly as it can with this lot. Perhaps stronger now, once word gets around of what happened to the last people who broke it and went hunting for the greywaren.”

Declan picked up his wine glass and tilted it towards the Gray Man. “Cheers to that.”

Gray mimicked his toast, and they both drained the glasses. Declan had seen Gray down bottles at a time with seemingly no change in his blood alcohol content, but he himself had to be careful now; if he wasn’t, he would slip, and wake up to a gaping maw of blackness where his memory of the night should be, an acidic pit in his stomach, a missing suit jacket, and a vibrant new collection of bruises.

Not that that had happened. More than once.

Everyone who knew them both wondered how Declan and Ronan could be brothers—one straight-laced, pinned up, sober, the other volatile and scarred from ill-advised escapades. The truth was that Ronan was not so much Declan’s foil as Declan’s refractor, bending his shadows into the sunlight. After a lifetime of corralling Ronan’s darkness, he did not know how to contend with his own. There had always been Matthew’s sunbeams to cut through the clouds, and now there was not.

After the Gray Man disappeared out the front door, Declan cradled another bottle in his hand—an expensive white, guaranteed to punish him with a nasty headache at the very least. He stared at the liquid trapped within the pale yellow bottle, and thought of his father, and thought of Ronan keeping Matthew safe, wherever they were, and placed it back on the rack.

He had fake graduation trip updates to schedule. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> new POVs!!! new characters!! Declan!!!
> 
> I know I personally need to be super invested to enjoy an OC in a fic, so I was a little nervous when I realized this story called for a couple. If that's you too, thank you for sticking with this! I'd love to hear what you think of Zoe!


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